After Facebook bought WhatsApp in 2014 for $19 billion, the social media giant has been introducing new features for the popular messaging platform. Status was the latest feature WhatsApp got in 2017 that is a version of Stories which Instagram introduced in August 2016 copied from Snapchat which later got to Facebook in January 2017 and Messenger later on in March the same year.
WhatsApp Status now has 500 million daily users and in 2020, is planning to introduce ads to the messaging platform through this feature.
WhatsApp is now testing a way to share your Status across Facebook’s apps and the feature is available to WhatsApp Beta users. Users are presented with a new sharing option beneath their Status to directly share it to Facebook Story, Instagram, Gmail and Google Photos.
WhatsApp told the Verge that they’re not doing anything to link your accounts on the two platforms. They’re using the same iOS and Android data-sharing APIs as every other app – data is transferred between the apps on-device.
Users are assured that even when you post to Instagram, the posts won’t be linked as Facebook systems registers them as two separate events. Regulators started looking into how the user data was being shared between Facebook and WhatsApp from as early as 2016. In 2017, Facebook was fined $122 million by the EU for misleading info about the WhatsApp acquisition.
It is worth noting that in January 2018, Facebook was also testing the ability to port your Instagram Stories to WhatsApp.
With Facebook working to integrate all its messaging apps – WhatsApp, Instagram Direct Messaging(the standalone app was shut down in April) and Messenger, this new crossposting feature will attract the scrutiny of privacy critics. Time will tell if MarkZuckerberg sticks to the Facebook “The Future is Private” mantra unveiled at this year’s F8 conference.
